Clinging to the shark is a sucker shark, attached to which and feeding off its crumbs is one still tinier, inch or two, and on top of that one, one the size of a nick of gauze; smaller and smaller (moron, idiot, imbecile, nincompoop) until on top of that is the last, a microdot sucker shark, a filament’s tip—with a heartbeat—sliced off, and the great sea all around feeding his host and thus him. He’s too small to be eaten himself (though some things swim with open mouths) so he just rides along in the blue current, the invisible point of the pyramid, the top beneath all else.
—Thomas Lux
Rights & Access
From The Cradle Place
Houghton Mifflin, 2004
Copyright 2004 Thomas Lux.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright 2004 by Thomas Lux. For further permissions information, contact Ronald Hussey, 215 Park Ave. South, New York, NY 10003, www.hmco.com External.
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Thomas Lux
Thomas Lux (1946-2017) published twenty poetry collections, including To the Left of Time (2016). Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, to working class parents, Lux attended Emerson College and the University of Iowa. He died in 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia.